Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday August 09, 2010 @09:46AM
from the i'm-going-home dept.

siliconbits writes "According to famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, it's time to free ourselves from Mother Earth. 'I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space,' Hawking tells Big Think. 'It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.'"

...And you say Eastern Europe is bad!
Internet: 15 USD a month (yeah, they upped the price, used to be 10 USD a month). 100 Mbit metropolitan speed. 20 Mbit external speed. 41 WebTV channels for free. Also free phone landline (and free unlimited calls within the same network). Granted, there's no extras in it, but I don't watch TV, I don't need any of those dumb TV channels.
Furthermore, I need no extra hardware, just plug the LAN cable in to my router and that's it.
Now regarding moving to other planets,

It's the new way to make money. Our old POTS (landline telephone) provider, Bell, has now mostly gone to pushing satellite TV, Cell Phone, and DSL. Sure they still offer regular phone lines, but from their commercials, you wouldn't know it. Basically, in Canada, you can have 1 company provide you with all your communications needs. I'm not saying that this is the average bill, or my bill, but many people I know easily pay $150 to Rogers every month for Cable + Internet. If it was just me, I could person

ME. Right now. Why would I want to have my tax dollars on this. I have to pay the mortgage. I have to pay the $320 Comcast bill. Going to Mars isn't going to get me anywhere.

Human mentality...

Human mentality, indeed. This is why modern democracy doesn't work well. It's infinitely preferably to many of the alternatives, but it is still the belief that selfish, short-sighted and just plain stupid people are fit to rule a country.Since power corrupts so completely, it's likely impossible to change this -- either you end up with idiot dictators, or idiot voters. Who both will ensure that safeguards against that situation becomes impossible to implement, for their own selfish reasons.

What's possible, though, is to exert influence and make plans that bet on not getting government support.While establishing an Asimovian Foundation is utopian, it's not infeasible that private interests may be able to get off the ground, despite selfish and spiteful attempts at sabotage from the couch potatoes and ruling politicos (but I repeat myself), and with enough attempts, even survive.

But leave important decisions to voters, and you ensure that nothing ever gets done.

I think human longevity advances are the only way to "cure" this. Make it so that human lifetimes can span more than a few decades, and people will suddenly be *way* more interested in not pissing in our own nest. Even if only the very rich can afford it, they're the ones with all the power, so it would still help.

No good, my friend. You are thinking, which is more than most people do. But, people will STILL think in the short term. Precious few people think 4 years into the future today. Double their lifespans, you MIGHT get them to think four years ahead. MAYBE. Most likely, they won't be able to think any further into the future than "Wonder if I can get laid tonight?" It's human nature. Sucks, don't it?

Human lifespans have already doubled, and the cycle within which people think has shrank. It's not about how long people live (in fact I would argue that when people had shorter lives they more frequently thought about their legacies, for example the prevalence of dynastic/aristocratic hereditary power structures), it's about how technology impacts the cycle. Centuries ago during the Age of Sail you had to wait months to know if a ship in your employ was successful. Centuries before that an expedition to China like Marco Polo's took decades. Assuming I had a travel visa in hand I could be in Beijing in before this time tomorrow. When you don't have to wait for anything planning becomes a matter of resources, and time, far from being a barrier, becomes a resource in of itself.

Right now, the problem in the USA seems to be the president and Congress. They're the ones who decided to cancel the manned mars projects, not the American people. That being said, the American people put them in there because they were only interested in entitlements, instead of doing the hard thing (re: JFK).

The entire sum of human existence shouldn't be forgotten for nothing, you know?

Yes. Why not? we are so unimportant anyway. Supposing that a great comet destroys the human race in the next 1000 years, humans would exist for, let's say, 100,000 years, which is 1/130,000 of the universe's age (13 billion years).

What you just said sounds really nice--only, that argument doesn't actually work in RL (real life).

GP was playing devil's advocate, but it's the reality of the situation. People can indeed be fundamentally divided using the two orthogonal dimensions: the have and have nots; and the want and want nots. And the majority of the people fall somewhere in the the have not and want quadrant.

Which means that the majority's not really thinking of their successive generations (especially those who do not have direct

Actually, rule of thumb for a standard 30-yr fixed rate mortgage is that 28% of your gross pay is the maximum mortgage payment you should be making. That's a bit more than 25% of your take-home.

honestly, unless you have regularly spoke your mine eloquently to your representatives in your government you have zero right to complain.

And what if you passionately and eloquently communicate your views, and your representative pockets another $5k donation from Comcast and ignores you? Or you passionately and eloquently communicate your views, and your representative says, "I disagree with you, and 52% of my constituents disagree with you, and I want to get re-elected... so you lose kid, sorry?" Have we lost our right to complain then, too? And why do I get the sneaking sense that to you, "disagreeing with what I think" == "doing it Glenn Beck style and looking like a tard?"

Shit. Does this mean that the world isn't as simply black and white as you'd like to imagine it?

We either leave this planet together, or we die on it divided. I think the greed inherent in human nature will prevent us from ever getting organized enough to leave this planet for another.

This actually kinda reminds me of a conversation we had last night....we watched the original V miniseries, and were talking about how stupid it was that they allowed the aliens into factories around the world simultaneously instead of just a factory or two at a time...but then, if they did that, countries would argue over who got to host them first.::shakes head:: stupid human beings...

Even if all of humanity was unified, we'd still die eventually if we stayed here. This planet has an expiration date. It's nice to pretend that if we were all hippies and lived like cavemen, that it'd last forever, but that isn't the case. Sooner or later we're gonna have to get out of here, or go extinct.

Earth's "best if lived on by" date is far enough away that I'm not terribly worried about it, but even aside from that, there are always asteroids out there that could blindside us. And I'm sure that's the sort of thing Hawking is referring to anyways.

Yeah 5 billion years into the future. During the previous 1 billion we evolved from amino acids to cells to amphibians, lizards, and intelligent mammals. So by the time the earth expires, we'll likely have moved into Q-like beings. Even if we stayed on this planet, its eventual scalding by the nearby star wouldn't affect us.

As for asteroids that caused massive extinctions, the previous one was 70 million years ago. And 250 million years ago. During that timespan we evolved from small rodent-like lizards into modern mammals. Who knows where we'll be in another 70 million years.

Exactly. For evolution to work (as fast as it had to get us here) we need natural selection to work as well, i.e. we need only the fittest (to survive) to reproduce. But nowadays almost everyone survives and reproduces. Natural selection forces on humans are lowest of any species on this planet. This means we are evolving very slowly and for all I know we could be degenerating into lower beings.

Even if all of humanity was unified, we'd still die eventually if we stayed here. This planet has an expiration date. It's nice to pretend that if we were all hippies and lived like cavemen, that it'd last forever, but that isn't the case.

Unfortunately, everything you say is also true of the Universe as a whole. Eventually, heat death will mean that thought itself will become physically impossible. Is it possible to escape into other universes? Maybe. Does that mean we should forget about space travel and put all our efforts into figuring that out?

But wait a minute. Supposing we had descendants traveling around space a billion years from now. It is far from certain they would be recognizably human. They might not even be mammals.

So should we give up on the future?

I think the notion that we should explore space in preparation for abandoning the Earth is misguided. I have no doubt that people sincerely believe this, and I even recognize that interesting philosophical arguments can be made for it. For example, the idea we might have to move off the Earth prematurely because we'd fouled our own nest raises the question why we might survive in hostile space when we could not survive on the benign Earth. The answer might be that humans are not very good at dealing rationally with plenty, but we have our minds wonderfully concentrated by imminent death.

Even so, I think that it is somewhat unnatural to be all that concerned with the fate of the human race in the distant future. How many of us let our day to day actions be guided by a concern for humanity ten generations in the future, much less ten thousand?

The real reason to explore space is not for the extension of the human species' longevity, but for the maximization of human experience. Imagine human experience as a rectangle which sits on a two dimension axis. The X-axis is time, and the "escape Earth" position seeks to maximize the area of the rectangle by stretching it as wide as possible. I have no fundamental objection to this, but it should not be undertaken at the expense of the Y axis, which is the personal growth of individuals in any single generation. At some point humanity will be facing the end of its term and can rationally seek the extension of the species' lifespan, but that is not anytime soon. When that point comes, we will be best served by developing a culture which is creative, informed, and adventurous.

That's the real reason we want to explore space. Space exploration is an adventure both metaphorically and manifestly so. That it is a multi-generational adventure only makes it better. When we have lost the zest for exploration, we have lost the capacity to grow, and are running on the momentum of prior generations.

Yeah... except using an incorrect adverb doesn't qualify one as semi-literate. And fact of the matter is, the average individual does NOT have a full and complete understanding even of his or her native tongue. Hell, I'd say that even an individual with a doctorate in linguistics is likely to occasionally misuse words.

As far as "only so many jobs" goes, theres always government... [wikipedia.org]

Most of those rules were invented AFTER the language was invented, by people with anal tendencies. Such as outlawing the double negative. Prior to ~1700 the double negative was not only an accepted part of language, but often ran into triple or quadruple negatives. The purpose was to add additional emphasis.

The blue book claim "Who refers to people. That and which refer to groups or things," sounds like an invented rule, not a reflection of the actual speakers of the language. i.e Prescriptive rather than descriptive. Real wordsmiths like ee cummins, Shakespeare, and Chaucer didn't give a fuck about rules. They wrote whatever they felt like writing.

- "Ther nas no man no wher so vertuous" (i.e., "There was not no man nowhere so virtuous")

- "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde / In all his lyf unto no maner wight." (i.e., "He never yet no vileness not said / In all his life to no sort of man.")

Well and good, but where do we get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem elsewhere? Hawking is a physicist, so I'm a bit surprised to hear him proposing something like this without explaining where the lift capacity is going to come from. There's a reason why Pan Am never began the orbital shuttle service depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey (aside, of course, from the fact that they went out of business).

We don't need to boost ourselves. We need to figure out the earliest life forms that we evolved from, and then blast great numbers, but small lightweight quantities, of that stuff towards any apparently habitable planets. If it takes a few billions years, so what. By spreading the human-precursor lifeforms we can colonize a larger number of planets and take advantage of evolution to ensure that the resulting lifeforms are suited to each venue.

Well and good, but where do we get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem elsewhere?

Use electricity to create liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. No, really, it's just that simple.

Hawking is a physicist, so I'm a bit surprised to hear him proposing something like this without explaining where the lift capacity is going to come from. There's a reason why Pan Am never began the orbital shuttle service depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey (aside, of course, from the fact that they went out of business).

Well, now you're moving the goalposts - first you ask about energy and then you blame it on lift capacity, which isn't the same thing at all. But the answer is equally simple - if we need that much lift capacity, we simply build that much lift capacity. As with energy, it's just an engineering problem.

The real problem has nothing to do with engineering, or cash, as many posters like to think. (Mostly because it lets them get their Twenty Minutes Hate in, using the current or past Administrations as the topic.) It's that there isn't anywhere to go in space. It's all about economics. Transport grows and prospers because it fills a need in moving people and goods from point A to point B, and in space there is no point B. (This is why the 'colonization of North America' and 'subsidize rockets like the government did railroads and airmail' models so beloved of space enthusiasts won't work.)

Well and good, but where do we get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem elsewhere? Hawking is a physicist, so I'm a bit surprised to hear him proposing something like this without explaining where the lift capacity is going to come from. There's a reason why Pan Am never began the orbital shuttle service depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey (aside, of course, from the fact that they went out of business).

The most important reason why nothing like the Space Clipper was ever built is not due to the launch energy required. It is the cost of building and maintaining an incredibly complex vehicle. Even if the energy used to launch the Space Shuttle were free its launch cost would be virtually unchanged. It costs NASA 450 million dollars per launch, the cost of actual LH2/O2 fuel (not just energy) is on the order of 40 cents per kilogram (for example) so the total fuel cost is on the order of one million dollars (!).

The ticket price for the 30 passengers of the Space Clipper would be $30,000 or so if energy was the only cost, still quite steep compared to air travel, but nothing like the $15 million of the Space Shuttle launch bill.

Hell, our technology is in decline, besides making faster computers, what has progressed in the last few decades? Nothing fundamental.

In fairness, quite a bit has expanded in our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of life. DNA was first described in 1953... 57 years later, we are mapping genomes (with some organisms fully mapped), manipulating, replacing and removing genes, and discovering the genetic basis for numerous diseases and other traits at an ever-increasing pace.

Just because it ain't silicon & metal doesn't mean it ain't technology.

The problem with that sentiment is that the wars have actually helped technology evolve. China was advancing faster for a long time, until a large enough piece of land was covered by it that real wars became uncommon. In Europe we continued trying to wipe each other out and it caused a lot of technological improvements. Competing countries and corporations advance technology a lot faster compared to monopolies and true world powers. The space race was sped up by the arms race between the USA and the USSR. Both just wanted to prove they were better. War may be a costly way to advance technology and not a nice one, but it is an very effective one. I would also prefer global peace as I do not think it's worth the suffering, but it would most probably hamper advancement, not speed it up.

The space race was sped up by the arms race between the USA and the USSR. Both just wanted to prove they were better.

But this isn't really "war" in the conventional sense is it? And it was the period during which the fastest and most impressive aerospace advances came. So it would seem that a good dickwaving competition is at least as good as an actual war.

Of course, I live in the US, where we can't even spend tax money on bridges. War is about the only thing we're willing to spend tax money on at all.

The federal budget would like to disagree with that statement. The majority of our federal budget is tied up in providing social programs and infrastructure, not in "war". Yes, the defense department gets a comparatively large portion of the budget. NO, it does not comprise all or even the bulk, of government spending. This is a facile talking point that is, unfortunately, entirely false as well.

Of course, as all the recent administrations have shown us, not having the tax money to spend doesn't mean you can't rack up a hell of a credit card bill. Why let things like "insufficient tax revenues" ruin the party?

The fact that wars have helped technology evolve suggests a defect in resource allocation, rather than a virtue of war.

Quite obviously, during any war worthy of the name, much of the population busies itself with the neccessary-but-useless tasks of filling catridges and emptying them. Substantial amounts of human and physical capital are reduced to rubble. Oil wells get set on fire, roads, rails and bridges get bombed, fields and forests get mined, etc, etc.

Wars represent a vast quantity of resources simply thrown away(in many cases this is the rational act on both parties' part, given the costs of being conquered; but from the overall welfare numbers, war is expensive), compared to peacetime. If, in fact, more R&D gets done during wartime, despite the reduced resources available, this suggests that peacetime could dedicate the same R&D resources, with less sacrifice(because a smaller slice of the bigger pie would be needed) or even more R&D resources for the same level of sacrifice(because getting X% of the larger pie is better than getting X% of the smaller one).

That's bullshit. Did the numerous people that died in WWII really make it any quicker? What it did do was provide some stimulus to the efforts, but it also wiped out a lot of people who could've been the one to figure out fusion by now or any number of unimagined future technologies. Not to mention that entire countries are destroyed and the labs, factories and libraries which they contained gone up in smoke.

War is one impetus to evolve technology, but it's hardly the only one. Pure curiosity is one that would as well, just not when people are behaving in such a belligerent, greedy fashion as they do currently.

Unless a event occurs that is so impacting and unprecedented in known human history. Humans will never learn to unite and live in cooperation with each other. Like you said, it's not in our nature.

And with 'impacting and unprecedented' I'm thinking in terms of Divine intervention, alien visits (which might turn out to be the same thing), natural disaster killing 70/80+ percent of the human population, the made up Mayan prophecy turning out to be true after all..That sort of stuff.

>>>I think the greed inherent in human nature will prevent us from ever getting organized enough to leave this planet for another.

In Robert's Heinlein's "Man Who Sold the Moon" it was greed that propelled humans to the Moon and Mars and outer planets. In fact that's pretty much true in every science fiction universe, even the utopian Star Trek. People don't do things for rational reasons like "we might go extinct" - they do them for personal gain, or a desire for a better life than the crappy one they have now.

If Armstrong reported back from Applo 11 he saw precious gems the size of beach balls we'd had bases on The Moon long ago. If Viking 1 and Viking 2 turned on their cameras and saw the ground was litered gold and silver we'd have bases there too. But the truth at the moment turns out they are just barren. On Earth people avoid vast stretches of barren "bad lands" and consider them mostly worthless. Why go out to The Moon and beyond just for really expensive "bad lands"?

Not greed but fear. There are a lot of people who live in the same 25 mile radius all their lives. The idea of moving away from this area and from their friends family and other protective sources makes them scared. Why did Europeans Colonize the United States Was it because they were less greedy then the others... No. There were people who were more Greedy who wanted Gold, or people who were more afraid to live in their homeland then to move.

Yes, I remember seeing that on Battlestar Galactica just recently. Though the whole ending with Katie Sackhoff being an angel (falling into a sinkhole on an alien world?) and God using MAGIC to create a Viper spacefighter did suck.

Easier it sure would be, but the point is about spreading the human race, not just life. And seeding primordial (missed a 'd' there) goo is like giving a dozen kids a random assortment of Lego blocks (plus enough time to forget about the Spongebob episode they just watched) and expecting identical results. Because of how evolution works, there's no guarantee you'd get anything like humans, and it would take far too long to see results.

That's a mentality that will lead to problems. Issues, particularly issues that cannot be solved (like the whole of mankind's problems here on Earth) cannot be worked on in a serial fashion. You wind up deadlocked if you need to solve one problem before working on the next. It's like thinking that I need $300 per month to spend on food, so I better save up enough money for 75 years worth of food before I even think about paying any rent. Short-signtedness taken to it's extreme.

The reality is we need to be researching this stuff now. When we can colonize another rock in space, we need to do so. Waiting for all of our problems to be solved before going into space will ensure that either some natural disaster or one of those many problems you're hoping to solve will wipe us out rather soon.

Okay, I'm quite happy to go find a new home amongst the stars, but at this point the only way that is going to happen is if the earth explodes and my ashes get distributed through space.

If our future is on worlds beyond earth, then we need to start with a space transportation, of the form of a single stage vehicle that can at least go to the moon and back repeatedly, with a turn around time of less than two days. Additionally the vehicle needs to be able to return from the moon without having to depend on an already established infrastructure.

I am a big fan of travelling to Mars and beyond, but the truth is we should establish a solid space flight foundation first. At the moment the technology we have is expensive and suitable in most cases only for one-way flights and of a crew of no more than seven people. Once we resolve the transportation issue, then we the Moon and Mars suddenly become relatively easy. One way flights are great for automated payloads, but for anything intended to transport humans, then we still have a ways to go.

I really believe that we need an x-prize designed for a single stage reusable space vehicle. The aim: launch into orbit with a single stage, do a full orbit, return to earth and do the same thing a second time within two days. The x-prize would be split into two parts: unmanned for the first offering and manned for the second offering.

I fundamentally agree with single stage reusable, but I don't know if we should aim for doing that from Earth's surface. Earth is a deep gravity well and has an atmosphere which necessitates extra power to counteract atmospheric friction and extra power to carry the extra weight that comes with heat shielding. We should instead establish a space base in GSO [wikipedia.org], with space elevators and Earth-based railguns to get humans and materials up there, so we can then have an interplanetary spaceflight system between th

What ignorance. Life is about metabolism and maintaining the efficiency of cells and the integrity of genetic sequences through cycle after cycle of mitosis. Most organisms degrade as this process repeats, leading to senescence AKA aging; however, some organisms such as Hydras [wikipedia.org] are biologically immortal because they do not suffer the effects of senescence. Moreover there is a species [wikipedia.org] of jellyfish that can actually reverse its life cycle and thereby is biologically immortal.

Death is biological problem, but there are signs in organisms that it is a problem that can be solved.

Nothing short of a earth destroying asteroid/comet hit would render this planet less inhabitable than even the most hospitable other planetary bodies within our reach. Even a Yucatan-sized hit would still leave the earth much more survivable than anywhere else. It would be WAY more practical to design underground bunkers and habitats here on earth than to try to move colonies to the moon or Mars. And nothing short of a hit that tears the planet into pieces is going to make earth less appealing than Mars or the moon.

Short of a direct hit into the Sun by some other largish body (from our observations - an exceedingly rare event), which would "flame up" the Sun quite a bit and perhaps push it off the main sequence prematurely (most likely not, so it would be at most just atmosphere & part ocean stripping solar flare - which will happen anyway, to much larger degree, in 1 billion years - so would be fine underground, and certainly not much different in other places in the system), what you're saying will happen in 5 B

Yes, and cosmological timescales are so much larger than ours. If we wait another 10000 years then it'll go from 65.50 to 65.51 million years since the dinosaurs went extinct. There's nothing here that needs doing now or in the next ten or hundred or even thousand years. We could easily have spent another million years on the monkey stage, there's no reason to think we need to get off this rock the same cosmological millisecond we figure out how. We're much better off figuring how to head off killer asteroids and hope 12000 km of earth means someone will survive on the back side if we're hit by a massive gamma blast. And if shit happens in our solar system then the whole system may be FUBAR, it's not really until we have a habitable exoplanet that we have a real backup to earth.

'I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space,' Hawking tells Big Think.

No, he doesn't. He said that exact quote two years ago, to CNN [cnn.com]. Of course, it may not necessarily be plagiarism, because he's been saying this for years [slashdot.org], and it isn't like he types off the cuff.

I think a more realistic plan would be to seed suitable planets with bacteria and just let evolution take care of the rest. Simpler lifeforms are much more resilient to extremes of temperature and atmosphere and are suitable for cryogenic storage for the long journeys. Animals higher up the evolutionary chain are too closely adapted to Earth to survive elsewhere really.

You are missing the point entirely. It isn't for us to up and leave earth all together, it's to continue to inhabit earth while also colonizing other places.

If we live on multiple planets/moons/space stations, then any one disaster would have to be truly fantastic in scope (enormous gamma ray burst large enough to wipe out a large area of space) to take out all of us at the same time.

Me thinks that the future of the human race is where we belong, here. We are probably thousands of years away from workable space travel. Perhaps we are stuck here for a reason, and perhaps this is an opportunity for all of us to start working out our issues and learn to live together with reasonable differences.

As humans can't survive anywhere else in the solar system, and as travel outside the solar system is impossible, it's obvious that humans will eventually go extinct. So what? The wish-fulfillment of Trekkies notwithstanding, basic physics and engineering make it a practical impossibility. I find the level of debate on this very frustrating. For instance, I guarantee someone somewhere will post something like "If everyone had your attitude, we'd never have left the trees!" (which of course is a self-evidently vacuous and stupid response to my observation about physics and engineering.)

Hawking is a physicist not an engineer or a biologist, and it shows. (He's also not very good at metaphysics, since he seems sometimes unable to understand that physics can't ultimately answer "why" questions. On the other hand, I'm not much good at thermodynamics, but at least I don't pontificate about black holes.)

Some people, however, are likely to misunderstand your post because, quite simply, they don't even begin to appreciate how much energy it would require to colonise another planet, or how likely we would be to exterminate ourselves by destroying our atmosphere if we even diverted significant resources to putting lots of stuff outside it. Basically, between "let's get off Earth" and "oh look, space colony", they engage in lots of vague handwaving about nonexistent technologies, nonexistent methods of energy generation, and nonexistent materials, the ability to create any of which in great enough quantities would imply a civilisation that really wouldn't need to waste them on a colonial experiment.

quite simply, they don't even begin to appreciate how much energy it would require to colonise another planet,

Farmers don't manually mix soil and humus on a daily basis. They don't spend huge amounts of energy aerating their soil. They just make sure that worms live happily in it, the worms increase at an exponential rate, and they do (most of) the work of tilling the soil.
I think that if you approach the problems of space colonization from a point of view that you have to do it all by yourself, with only the available energy that you have when you start your Moon or Mars colony, that you're doing it wrong:-)
Also I think developing a toolkit for space colonization is very intellectually stimulating and exciting.
There should be an X-prize for a solar cell production facility that operates only on sunlight.
And another one for finding lichens that (veeeeeery slowly) weather Lunar regolith.
And another one for airtight cement locally produced from excavated asteroid bits.
Etc. etc. (you get the idea).

Poverty of imagination. Human's can't survive anywhere else in the solar system eh? Humans couldn't survive in the middle of Antarctica either, except that they brought the infrastructure with them to do it (and are resupplied at will, though independence in that area would be possible if it were necessary and cost effective, which it is neither). Humans could survive any number of places elsewhere in the solar system provided they have the infrastructure for controlling their environment, feeding and power

Stephen Hawking is taking the survival of the species slant to preserve human space exploration. Let's look at it another way. Who gets to go? Only the wealthy? The 'geniuses'? The 'artists'? Random sampling?

Human beings are arrogant enough to think that the universe couldn't go on without them...

If we can make a self-contained, self-sustaining colony on the earth, then our species is more robust (we can survive the loss of all the plants, for instance, or if we've colonized the ocean floor, we can survive when supervillains ignite the atmosphere), and we get some experience learning the ins and outs of closed ecosystems.

Once they work reliably, then we can add "in space" to the project description, with all the additional cost and complexity that implies.

The way this will work is that government will spend lots of our tax money and if eventually some way is found (a big "if") then only the most "worthy" (i.e. politicians and rich people) will get to go. The rest of us will die here.

Much better to spend the money on fixing the problems here (but that might cost corporations profits so not likely to happen).

Check out Project orion [wikipedia.org]
I am sure it can be made even more risk free in terms of radiation spread ( which is already very small), and it absolutely can get us to mars or launch heavy stuff for constructing O'Neil cylinders [wikipedia.org]. And with a large enough space vehicle/station, asteriod belt can practically provide all the material we need for making more orion crafts.

It's our mess, we need to live with it. The planet is still *exceptionally* salvageable, in the lifetime of genX even. No matter how cool we make the spacecraft, they'll still need raw materials from time to time, which would still mean strip-mining another planet somewhere.

Also, and I'm a cold-hearted bastard for saying this (obviously), but I think Hawkings underestimates the value of going hiking, climbing a mountain, going surfing, rolling around on the beach under a blanket just after watching a sunset, etc. Would there be new activities avail in space? Sure, but if we can't "sustain" our environment when it has massive automated systems for cleaning our air, producing food, breaking down waste, cleaning water, etc...then what makes us think we'd do better in a metal can where we have to recreate all those systems ourselves? The Earth should never be left because it's not sustainable. If it should ever be left, it should be because we want to learn and explore. G-d, why can't we have pure motives.

I think the point is that since, in addition to all those people, someone like Hawking is saying it as well just adds credence to the idea. No one is claiming that Hawking invented the idea; they're just pointing out that Hawking is one of the many who follow this particular line of thinking.

Nowhere in that statement does she say it is. There's a second quote further on which could be taken together with this to imply, kinda, that she was making the statement from the traveler's perspective, but it's far from clear, and, I also think, "Which is more likely, the physicist doesn't know basic relativity or the reporter botched it and gave quotes out of context?" The question pretty much answers itself.

Yeah, he's just totally riding off of the fact he managed to become celebrated as one of the smartest people in the world and helped millions become interested in astro-physics, all whilst dealing with a crippling disability.

He clearly needs to get over himself! You can totally hear the smugness in that voice synthesiser of his!

And what is Dr. Stephen Hawking supposed to have developed? The guy deals with gravitational theory. I suppose you think he should have come up with some kind of Star Trek [memory-alpha.org] 'singularity drive' or something as a consequence? Please.

As with most things, it is pure cost that prevents in-system colonization not technological failings. The main cost is simply the size and fuel for the launch vehicle especially as it must be quite heavy to include enough radiation shielding.

A National Research Council report released last Friday revealed that only $4 million annually has been allotted to identify civilization-ending near-Earth objects (NEOs). Of the $3.1 trillion in the 2009 US federal budget, four million dollars represents only 0.000129%. To put it in more concrete terms, if your salary was $40,000 last year, you

I stand by the statement, your paranoia notwithstanding. I fear my great grandchildren dying not of something falling out of the sky, but by the effects of ecosystems gone bad, the dying ocean then bereft of fish to eat and poisoned by fertilizer and pesticide runoff.

They'll die because some idiot took up the battles of their ancestors, hijacked a nuke, and used it to settle some perceived debt that's hundreds of years old.

The doomsday sayers have been using the excuse to leave, find a new nirvana, only to

This presents a false dichotomy - there are more than enough resources available to work on both. Achieving extra-Earth travel and "fixing" the problems that plague us here require different solution sets. Neither is completely insolvable. The only true problem is that humanity as a whole has yet to determine that either is as or more important than their self-centered point of view.